1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates the mounting arrangement between a face panel and modular jacks and more particular, to a multidirectional modular jack and face panel mounting structure, which allows modular jacks to be installed respective mounting through holes of a face panel in one of a series of angular positions.
2. Description of the Related Art
When arranging a local area network in a building, optical fiber cables or electrical cables are extended from a server room in the building to modular jacks in the walls at different rooms and different floors of the building so that computers in each room of the building can be connected to the adjacent modular jacks by modular plugs of computer cables.
In the server room, racks are installed to support network switches, servers and other devices. The servers in one rack are electrically connected to a face panel of the respective rack. The face panels of all racks in the server room are electrically connected by network cables.
However, with increase in office business and office personnel and rapid development of network communication technology, some problems may follow. The existing capacity of the network equipment in the server room may be insufficient to meet the needs of the company. However, adding extra network equipment to expand the capacity requires much server room installation space. Using small sized network equipment can save server room space.
When installing multiple network equipments in a limited server room, patch cords may have to be bent into a curved condition to reduce space occupation. However, a large angle bending of patch cords may break the core wires.
To avoid over-bending of patch cords U.S. Pat. No. 6,866,541 discloses an angled patch panel with cable support bar for network cable racks. According to this design, the patch panel includes a patch panel frame and rack mounting plates. The frame forms a central section having a longitudinal width sized to fit within the network rack. The rack mounting plates are provided on opposite longitudinal ends of the central section and allow the panel to be mounted to a network rack. The central section includes two panel sections angled outwardly in an inverted V-shapes, and the central section has mounted thereon a plurality of cable connectors that receive cabling on the front side and the rear side of the patch panel frame. Each connector has a horizontal axis. According to this design, angled patch panel simply allows module jacks to be arranged at right angles. When connecting module plugs of network cables to the module jacks at the angled patch panel, the network cables can simply be extended in two directions. Further, a server rack fitting the angled patch panel must be designed having an extended depth, increasing space occupation. Therefore, this design is not conducive for high-density installation.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,762,839 discloses a patch panel assembly including an angle module having one or more RJ modules, one or more insulation displacement contact (IDC) modules and a printed circuit board. According to this design, all RJ modules keep the plug receiving holes thereof in one same direction after installation. When connecting RJ plugs of network cables from different directions to the RJ modules, the extending directions of the network cables have to be changed to fit the extending direction of the plug receiving holes of the RJ modules.